No one following the Steven Salaita case was surprised Thursday when
the displaced scholar announced he’s suing top administrators of the
University of Illinois System and its Urbana-Champaign campus. Salaita
had been trying for months to force the university to give him back the
tenured professorship in the American Indian studies program he says is
his. The institution, meanwhile, has continued to stand behind its
decision to rescind the appointment -- which it argues wasn’t yet final
-- due to the tenor of Salaita’s anti-Israel tweets.
But the seemingly inevitable lawsuit,
filed in a U.S. district court in Illinois, contained a twist: Salaita
is also suing the John Doe donors he says illegally interfered in his
contractual agreement with the university. Legal experts call the move
creative, if not realistic, and relatively rare among higher education
claims.

Just what do university professors do all day?
Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has been hearing plenty on that topic
since he remarked this week, during a discussion of his proposal to cut state appropriations
for the University of Wisconsin system by $300-million over two years,
that the universities “might be able to make savings just by asking
faculty and staff to consider teaching one more class a semester.”
The governor’s comment, writes the Journal Sentinel,
a newspaper in Milwaukee, bares “one of the most enduring sources of
friction” in American higher education: What is the primary function of
the faculty? On one side of the question are critics of universities who
see it as working with students in the classroom. On the other are
defenders of advancing knowledge through research, and sharing it in
ways that go beyond the classroom.
The question is part of a larger public debate that goes back to at
least 1967, when another Republican governor, Ronald Reagan of
California, asserted that taxpayers should not be “subsidizing
intellectual curiosity.” (See an article in The Chronicle,“The Day the Purpose of College Changed.”)

Steven G. Salaita’s widely anticipated lawsuit over the University of
Illinois’s decision to deny him a tenured professorship takes the
innovative step of also demanding damages from university donors who
pressured its leaders not to hire him.
Along with its expected targets—top campus and university-system
administrators, and nearly all of the system’s trustees—Mr. Salaita’s federal lawsuit
names as defendants several as-yet-unidentified donors who threatened
to withhold money from the university if it made good on its job offer
to him.
The donors, and many others, had opposed the university’s plans to
hire Mr. Salaita as a professor on its Urbana-Champaign campus because
they objected to his inflammatory criticisms of Israel and argued that
his statements were anti-Semitic. His lawsuit is in response to the
university’s September decision to rescind its job offer to him.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Last week, a team was sent to USM by the American Association of
University Professors to investigate claims against USM’s execution of
academic freedom and shared governance.
Chairing the investigative committee was Michael Berube, director of
the institute for arts and humanities at Pennsylvania State University.
According to Berube, hundreds of requests for intervention come
before the AAUP every year, regarding what he described as “shady
practices in American higher education.” From those, only a handful are
selected.
“The investigative process is very labor intensive,” said Berube. “We
try to take the ones that we think are the most important for the
future of higher education.”
USM fell into that category.

News outlets are no longer the only
ones asking academics about the science of deflated footballs.
Investigators for the National Football League have approached physics
professors at Columbia University to help them understand how footballs
supplied by the New England Patriots might have lost two pounds of air pressure
during the first half of a conference championship game last week.

After first calling the university’s
physics department, a representative of the law firm hired by the league to
investigate the matter—which has become a national sensation in the run-up to
this year’s Super Bowl—followed up with an email to the department, according
to The New York Times.

News outlets are no longer the only ones asking academics about the science of deflated footballs.
Investigators for the National Football League have approached physics
professors at Columbia University to help them understand how footballs
supplied by the New England Patriots might have lost two pounds of air
pressure during the first half of a conference championship game last
week.
After first calling the university’s physics department, a
representative of the law firm hired by the league to investigate the
matter—which has become a national sensation in the run-up to this
year’s Super Bowl—followed up with an email to the department, according
to The New York Times.
- See more at: http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/academics-vs-ballghazi-round-2/92985#sthash.y8BLTgod.dpuf

Steven G. Salaita’s widely
anticipated lawsuit over the University of Illinois’s decision to deny him a
tenured professorship takes the innovative step of also demanding damages from
university donors who pressured its leaders not to hire him.

Along with its expected targets—top
campus and university-system administrators, and nearly all of the system’s
trustees—Mr. Salaita’s federal lawsuit names as defendants several
as-yet-unidentified donors who threatened to withhold money from the university
if it made good on its job offer to him.

The donors, and many others, had
opposed the university’s plans to hire Mr. Salaita as a professor on its Urbana-Champaign
campus because they objected to his inflammatory criticisms of Israel and
argued that his statements were anti-Semitic. His lawsuit is in response to the
university’s September decision to rescind its job offer to him.

The Carnegie Unit has been around
for more than a century, and unless someone can come up with a better way of
tracking college credit, it won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. It presents
challenges, but it has value because it sets minimum instructional standards.

That’s the conclusion of a report being released on Thursday by the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The report, "The Carnegie
Unit: A Century-Old Standard in a Changing Education Landscape," examines
the role of the Carnegie Unit, more commonly called the credit hour, in an
ever-evolving world of education.

The authors of the report looked
into the Carnegie Unit and its relationship to various elements of education
reform, specifically transparency and flexibility in regard to the design and
delivery of education, both in elementary and secondary schools and in
postsecondary education.

The
Carnegie Unit has been around for more than a century, and unless
someone can come up with a better way of tracking college credit, it
won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. It presents challenges, but it has
value because it sets minimum instructional standards.
That’s the conclusion of a report
being released on Thursday by the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching. The report, "The Carnegie Unit: A Century-Old
Standard in a Changing Education Landscape," examines the role of the
Carnegie Unit, more commonly called the credit hour, in an ever-evolving
world of education.
The authors of the report looked into the Carnegie Unit and its
relationship to various elements of education reform, specifically
transparency and flexibility in regard to the design and delivery of
education, both in elementary and secondary schools and in postsecondary
education.
- See more at: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Credit-Hour-Is-Here-to/151465/#sthash.qRSrFlGo.dpuf

Alexander Enyedi was "deeply
disappointed," he wrote in an email to his top subordinates, when his
contract as dean of Western Michigan University’s College of Arts and Sciences
was not renewed. He was not the only one.

In the past week, many faculty and
staff members, students, and alumni have made their opposition clear. About 200
people attended a Board of Trustees meeting last Thursday to express their
support for Mr. Enyedi, reported Mlive.com, a Michigan news site. By
Wednesday, more than 1,200 people had signed an online petition requesting that his contract be
renewed for another five years after it expires, on June 30. He has been dean
since 2010.

Sarah Hill, an associate professor
of anthropology and environmental studies, started the petition. She says Mr.
Enyedi’s advocacy of the university’s "core mission" of teaching,
research, and service, and his devotion to preparing students to meet the
challenges of the 21st century, make him "the symbolic leader of something
which is much bigger than Alex."

The three Eastern Michigan
University professors had no idea that they were under attack by the Honors
College students seated before them.

The three women knew that many of
the nearly 230 freshmen in the auditorium resented having to show up at 9 a.m.
every Friday for a mandatory interdisciplinary-studies class. But whatever
unhappy students previously had said directly to them seemed mild in comparison
to the verbal abuse being hurled at them silently as they taught one Friday
morning last fall.

Students typed the words into their
smartphones, and the messages appeared on their classmates’ screens via Yik
Yak, a smartphone application that lets people
anonymously post brief remarks on virtual bulletin boards. Since its release,
in November 2013, the Yik Yak app has been causing havoc on campuses as a
result of students’ posting threats of harm, racial slurs, and slanderous
gossip.